(1) Field of the Invention
The present invention is concerned with the utilization of the cocoa fruit and more particularly with its complete utilization with the purpose of producing valuable products such as novel, highly nutritious, salubrious, and tasteful feed compositions for domestic animals and especially for small animals such as chicken, rabbits, and others, and to products and feed compositions produced thereby.
(2) Description of the Prior Art
To increase stock-farming and cattle-breeding in tropical countries is of the greatest importance in the fight against malnutrition and hunger and will become of even greater importance due to the enormous increase in the world's population which can be expected within the next decades, especially in underdeveloped countries. To utilize additional acreage for cultivating and growing tuberous plants, grain, and other farm products is one way of increasing the available food supply. Another way is to improve the food value by feeding such farm products to domestic animals. This has the advantage that the resulting food is richer in protein. Its production, however, requires more time and is rather expensive. Access to additional sources of food is such an urgent matter that it is not possible to utilize the newly developed acreage for producing animal feed. Such acreage should better be used for growing and harvesting crops such as cereals which can directly be made available for human consumption. Therefore, in the initial stage of producing more food for the world's population it must be endeavored to provide and utilize to the greatest possible extent agricultural and industrial waste products for feeding cattle and other domestic animals. Especially agricultural waste products which are readily available at present and which usually are obtainable in large amounts and of a uniform quality, should be employed as animal feed. This is of the greatest importance in the tropics where every effort should be made to feed domestic animals with such waste products. Keeping large herds of domestic animals in the tropics has been made possible by the achievements of modern veterinary medicine, immunology, etc. The only difficulty to overcome is the question of providing sufficient feed for the animals.
The pods of the Theobroma fruits are available in many places. Heretofore they were considered disagreeable waste products. They were obtained by opening the fruits by means of cutlasses, machetes, and the like, removing the seeds or beans with the pulp from the pod husks by means of a spoon-like instrument, and subjecting the beans to fermentation. The relatively high potassium content of the remaining pods allowed their utilization as fertilizer to enrich the soil to a certain extent with said element. However, the rotting pods become very rapidly a dreaded source of infection with brown rot, black pod rot, and other microorganisms which grow very well on the slimy pods. Their use as fertilizer, therefore, was not recommendable. The native population in the tropics sometimes dried the pods, ashed them, and used the resulting ash as soap substitute in a similar manner as wood ashes were previously used for laundering.
It is well known that near the places where the cocoa fruits have been opened and the empty cocoa fruit pods were piled, withering and dying of all trees near that place are to be expected. Therefore, the marketing boards in the cocoa growing countries advise their farmers to burn or to burry these parts of the cocoa fruit. This advice, however, is usually not followed by the farmers as it causes additional work without any apparent financial reward.
The cocoa beans taken out of the parenchymatous tissue of the cocoa fruits with the smeary and juicy cocoa pulp attached thereto are submitted to the so-called fermentation process which differs traditionally in the various areas of cocoa tree cultivation. In West Africa, for instance, the beans are placed in heaps on large leaves, usually banana or plantain leaves, in amounts of 50 kg. to 500 kg. and the heaps are covered with banana or plantain leaves. In other areas the cocoa beans are fermented in holes in the ground or placed in baskets, wooden boxes, or empty barrels. Sometimes the places where fermentation takes place are of a size that can be called "central fermentation plants". For starting fermentation or for transporting the beans with the pulp to such fermentation plants, the farmers collect a sufficiently large quantity of cocoa beans with the smeary pulp attached thereto. In South America the beans and pulp are transported to the central fermentation plants in baskets attached to the sides of mules. Due to the time which elapses between the opening of the fruits and the start of proper fermentation, i.e. the moment when the temperature necessary to kill the germ of the cocoa beans starts to rise, the manner of storing the beans during the collection, the effect of the weather which causes drying out of the pulp or its liquefication, and other factors are responsible for the fermentation to start in a completely uncontrolled manner and sometimes not at all, differing from batch to batch and from day to day. Before the beans with the pulp reach the central fermentation plants many factors such as changes in temperature and duration of storage and transportation, humidity, the action of microorganisms, contamination and others, affect the fermentation so that it is quite impossible to carry out fermentation in an always uniform and controllable manner. This is the reason why, for instance, the farmers in Santo Domingo do not ferment their beans any more and, therefore, produce cocoa of varying and frequently inferior quality.
Up to now it was economically not feasible to transport the cocoa fruit as such, i.e. in the closed state to the fermentation plants because nine tenth of the weight of the cocoa fruit to be transported, namely the parenchymatous tissue thereof and the peels, simply had to be discarded as a waste product.